dNSP: A biologically inspired dynamic Neural network approach to Signal Processing

The arriving order of data is one of the intrinsic properties of a signal. Therefore, techniques dealing with this temporal relation are required for identification and signal processing tasks. To perform a classification of the signal according with its temporal characteristics, it would be useful to find a feature vector in which the temporal attributes were embedded. The correlation and power density spectrum functions are suitable tools to manage this issue. These functions are usually defined with statistical formulation. On the other hand, in biology there can be found numerous processes in which signals are processed to give a feature vector: for example, the processing of sound by the auditory system. In this work, the dNSP (dynamic Neural Signal Processing) architecture is proposed. This architecture allows representing a time-varying signal by a spatial (thus statical) vector. Inspired by the aforementioned biological processes, the dNSP performs frequency decomposition using an analogical parallel algorithm carried out by simple processing units. The architecture has been developed under the paradigm of a multilayer neural network, where the different layers are composed by units whose activation functions have been extracted from the theory of Neural Dynamic [Grossberg, S. (1988). Nonlinear neural networks principles, mechanisms and architectures. Neural Networks, 1, 17-61]. A theoretical study of the behavior of the dynamic equations of the units and their relationship with some statistical functions allows establishing a parallelism between the unit activations and correlation and power density spectrum functions. To test the capabilities of the proposed approach, several testbeds have been employed, i.e. the frequencial study of mathematical functions. As a possible application of the architecture, a highly interesting problem in the field of automatic control is addressed: the recognition of a controlled DC motor operating state. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.